ZURICH - Violence on the field and hooliganism off of it have led FIFA to radically scale back the format, the game and the venues for the 2007 FIFA World Cup football championships. The major changes include having more teams but playing shortened but higher scoring games on much smaller fields in much smaller venues, reducing the number and size of players and keeping them in fixed areas on the field of play.
These changes came about as FIFA (officially, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association) realized that without substantial changes the event could continue to spin out of control. The Organising Committee for the FIFA World Cup established the Pelé Commission, headed by Brazilian football legend Pelé, immediately after the 2006 World Cup ended. The Pelé Commission was given a directive to come up with "meaningful and practical changes that would restore the World Cup to its former dignity and glory" -- and to make the changes in time to implement them for 2007.
In order to do that the Pelé Commission (officially the FIFA Commission on the Future Shape of Football) decided that it would model its improved World Cup after the highly successful ITSF (International Table Soccer Federation) tournament which was held earlier this month in St. Vincent, Italy. The Foosball World Cup, as it is called, is a model of decorum and sportsmanship for world championships having gone for years without a single reported incident of fan or player violence.
By implementing a reduced field size (from a minimum of 6400 square meters to a maximum of 10,050 square centimeters), the number of spectators per match will greatly reduced, from an average of 52,401 per match to an estimated 32, so the chances of a mob mentality developing will diminished substantially. Because of the fixed positions of the smaller players on the playing surface, incidents of player violence, such as the infamous head butting involving French national team player Zinédine Zidane, will not just be reduced but eliminated altogether.
The reduced-size playing field will make television broadcasts simpler, easier and much cheaper, and so more teams will be allowed in the tournament. Since the major source of revenue is TV ad sales, and viewership is expected to be greater with more teams, overall profits are expected to go up under the new reduced format game.
As in foosball, in the new football format tiny 'players' will be arrayed along rods, each with a handle, on a table shaped football field. Each human player/coach controls the rods for one team, moving them to the left or right to position the tiny players to try to score a goal or to block the other team's attempts. In the new FIFA Football World Cup the players will be exactly the same as in foosball except that the goalies will wear queerly colored outfits.
In related news, Electronic Arts has announced that FIFA 07 (also known as FIFA Soccer 07 and FIFA Football 07), its football simulator video games, in all versions will be modified to new FIFA World Cup standards and so will now only available on the smaller formats, such as Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS.
Copyright 2006 Douglas Slaguod
